The Feminist Spectator ruminates on theatre, performance, film, and television, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, other identities and overlaps, and our common humanity. It addresses how the arts shape and reflect our lives; how they participate in civic conversations; and how they serve as a vehicle for social change and a platform for pleasure. It’s accessible to anyone committed to the arts’ political meanings.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

L Word Season Five Finale, the Jodi Addendum

A friend wrote to remind me that I hadn’t addressed the Jodi debacle of the last episode(s), which does seem worth at least a few words. Jodi’s character shifted in unpredictable and rather unbelievable ways through the course of her run on the series. She started as a sex radical of sorts who didn’t want to commit to a monogamous relationship with Bette, and ended as a betrayed girlfriend infuriated by Bette’s affair with Tina. Too bad the show’s writers couldn’t maintain their hold on a character who could practice non-monogamy with magnanimity, but had to reduce her to a conventionally jealous, spurned lover.

When at the end Bette protests that their relationship never really worked, spectators can only agree. As I’ve noted before, Jennifer Beals and Marlee Matlin (who apparently have long been close friends in “real life”) never sparked much, physically or emotionally. Their sex scenes seemed forced and perfunctory; toward the end, when Jodi so frequently tried to force herself on Bette, their scenes were nearly distasteful.

Bette’s rekindled desire for Tina inspired all sorts of new moralizing from her friends (I still can’t fathom why Bette’s choices are always judged so harshly), with everyone protesting that they didn’t want to see Jodi hurt. Although the character was drawn as everyone’s best friend this season, the inner circle’s reactions tread close to pity for the disabled deaf girl who was about to be dumped.

Granted, Jodi’s affection for the L girls made her into a good buddy, but I couldn’t help feeling suspicious and uneasy that their protectiveness toward her came at least partly from her deafness. While writing a deaf character into a series like The L Word is a progressive choice, implicitly pitying her, under cover of emotional support, seems cheap.

Jodi’s “explosive” unveiling of her new “sculpture” in the last episode was a gratuitous attack, a gleefully performed humiliation of the woman The LWord loves to bash. Why does Bette have to take another one right between the eyes? Because she's so smart? Her speech at Jodi's premiere was elegant and eloquent, her intellect and her (fabricated, of course) insights into art-making keen and original. The show inevitably undercuts these admirable public performances by so openly dragging her through the mud of her private life.

And since when does a sculptor use two-dimensional multi-media to make her art? The scene at the gallery felt unnecessary, a public shaming of Bette that didn’t further the plot any more than letting Jodi exit with uncharacteristically vindictive self-righteousness.

I’m left wondering what will become of Max’s affair with Jodi’s interpreter, and who will be the next temporary standard-bearer for the show’s more radical (although in the context of The L Word, “radical” is relative) artistic and sexual practices. Tune in next February.

2 comments:

I just discovered your blog today and I'm glad I did. I never understood the whole Jodi storyline because I don't think Bette and Jodi ever worked as a couple from the start. I was watching the first few episodes from season 4 where Jodi is first introduced and they clashed from the start and never seemed to really have any sort of connection outside the art world.

I only started watching The L Word this year and had to go back through the previous seasons to catch up. I'll miss the show when it goes off the air, despite all its faults, mainly because it was incredibly ground-breaking and I liked the characters and crazy things they got themselves involved in.

Thanks for this, and for agreeing with my take on that relationship. They had no connection outside of the art world, and frankly not much connection inside it, either. Bette always seemed to be judging Jodi's choices, whether about how to handle the student who used a gun in his performance piece, or her more aesthetic choices. They didn't even like the same furniture! Guess it was just a protracted set up, to explain why Bette would be so eager to rekindle her relationship with Tina, eventually.

About Me

I'm a writer who loves going to the theatre and the movies, watching television, reading novels, and then thinking about what all of it means. I teach at Princeton University, in the English Department and in the Lewis Center for the Arts Theatre Program. I also direct Princeton's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I believe in quality writing about the arts and the importance of the arts to social life. I also believe the arts do and should give us pleasure and hope, as well as inspiring our creativity and a more expansive sense of what our lives together can be.